This App Can Solve Any Problem You Point Your Camera At

We've all done it, flipped to the back of the textbook for answers to the odd-numbered math problems that stumped us. It's not cheating per se, because it's literally our own learning tools offering up the solutions—but it's not exactly showing us how to arrive there on our own, either. This is where Socratic steps in.

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'Homework done in a snap' is a tagline we can get behind.

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The Socratic app is simple: Take a photo on your phone of any problem, and the app uses artificial intelligence to scan millions of sample homework questions and give you step-by-step explanations and videos explaining the answer. The app currently covers 23 subjects, including calculus, history, chemistry, physics, English, anatomy, and psychology.

The common thought-process of struggling students, which explains why it's important to make learning easier than cheating.

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So is this cheating? Not if you realistically look at how students are already solving problems they don't understand—but this way they're actually getting taught the answer rather than just copying the numbers down. "Every student today goes to the Internet, goes to Google, to ask all of their questions—this is something that's happening anyway," co-founder Shreyans Bhansali has pointed out. "We read the question, we figure out what they need to learn to answer it, and then we teach them that stuff."